Image transcript:

White background meme with the text “People want to build a massive connected network of driverless cars to ‘solve’ traffic. Doesn’t that sound a bit like giving SkyNet control of all the nukes?”

There are illustrative images of the proposed “network of driverless cars” as well as a menacing image of a terminator robot and an image from a news report about a deadly crash caused by a self-driving Uber.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    Banning human-operated vehicles and private car ownership would be two huge, cultural hurdles to clear. So why don’t we do it in two steps? We can ban private car ownership right now to prepare. It would be pretty easy to transition over to everybody driving a vehicle from a car-share system. It could be phased in over time while we’re working on perfecting self-driving. We could probably reduce a lot of parking and vehicle demand, too, since private vehicles sit idle over 95% of the time. Then, when self-driving vehicles are ready, the operators of the car-share vehicles would be in position to switch them all over to autonomous mode, en masse.

    If you think I’m insane to suggest that it’s politically feasible to just ban private car ownership, hey, that’s exactly the point I want to make.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•1 year ago

      I feel like we could do driverless buses right now if they had dedicated right of ways.

      That’s another two step item where we could do the first step because we feel good about the way the tech is trending, and even if the tech fails, oops we only made a better life for everyone with dedicated bus lanes.

      • @Fried_out_KombiOPMEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        Yeah, I’d be down for this. Having the dedicated infrastructure would reduce the number of variables and allow the opportunity for sensors along the route for more checks so you don’t have to 100% rely on a black-box model. Plus, it solves one of the biggest operating expenses of buses (labor), which would make it much cheaper to run very high-frequency bus services.

        As a bonus point, you could make them trolleybuses, so if they do something too crazy, they just lose power and stop.